BY THIS TIME I WAS A REGISTERED first-year student at Rhodes University. I had been able to access a higher education that, under this current system, hundreds of thousands of young black people never will. The militant Youth League of Malema had planted in me a seed that was refusing to be left unwatered. I had grown obsessed with the land and agrarian question and knew that if there was any real contribution I could make to the ongoing struggle of blackness against this oppressive system, it would have to be in rewriting the narrative of native identity. I had since determined that the rewriting of this narrative depends on giving back our people their source of dignity: the land. If I was going to be an activist, I would be a land and agrarian rights activist both on the ground and academically. I registered for a Bachelor of Social Science degree majoring in Earth Sciences/Geography and Economics, and took up two electives, Sociology and Anthropology.
I arrived in Grahamstown with great determination to participate in student politics. By this time I had been introduced to the politics of the Congress Movement at student level. The year before I went to the university, I had been an invited guest at the 24th National Congress of the ANCYL at Gallagher Convention Centre, Midrand. A few months after that, I had also been a guest at the national elective congress of SASCO in Mangaung, where I had tasted the atmosphere of student politics. It was an atmosphere I wanted to be assimilated into. But I wanted to experience it from within the pan-Africanist movement.
There was a reason I chose to go to Rhodes University, an ivory tower of white supremacy and bourgeois privilege. I had, of course, wanted to be at the University of the Western Cape, among progressive minds. Yet my decision to go to Rhodes University was influenced by my newfound belief that if institutions of higher learning in our country are to be transformed, there is a need for radical minds to be in the belly of the beast where transformation is still only a rumour. I posed an argument to my mother that being at a transformed university would be futile as there was no work that needed to be done there. What was needed was to be where transformation was being resisted and influence that space. I had been a young and naïve eighteen-year-old when I went to Stellenbosch University and had bolted because of the lack of transformation within the institution. But I was twenty-one now, wiser and more courageous. I was prepared to take on the system of white domination that was crippling black students in our liberal universities.
I arrived at Rhodes with great expectations. I knew that it was a liberal institution and, as such, I expected that there would be some element of depoliticisation of students. But what I found there shocked me beyond measure. Not only was Rhodes University extremely liberal, it was also far more depoliticised than I had imagined. Hardly any political formations existed and those that did were rendered irrelevant by the apolitical atmosphere of the institution. The Progressive Youth Alliance, which is comprised of the ANCYL, the Young Communist League of South Africa and SASCO as the leader, had no presence at all. There was no pan-Africanist or Black Consciousness-leaning student political formation. Not a single one. Hardly any students even knew or cared to know about student politics.
There were various academic, cultural and sports societies, most of which I found very reactionary. Examples of these are the Zimbabwean Society (ZimSoc), the Zulu Society, the Lesotho Society (LeSoc) and the Xhosa Society. I found the existence of these societies to be very fragmenting to the student body and the African struggle that confronts our continent. I also felt that Rhodes University was not nurturing cultural diversity but was rather creating fertile grounds for tribalism within the institution. This frustrated me greatly and I was determined to wage a battle against it.
Realising that there was no political student organisation besides those of the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA), which was made up of three component structures of the ANC-led Mass Democratic Movement and which I couldn’t join because they were not pan-Africanist in posture, I decided that I would not be part of any political movement until such time I was able to establish a Black Consciousness organisation on campus. I knew that this would prove to be a herculean task because of the liberal nature of Rhodes University. Most of the students at the university were from a middle-class background, including the black population. As a result of this, it was very difficult to mobilise them into a formidable force, particularly around political matters, as I wanted to do.
My frustrations with the black middle class were born at Rhodes University. I didn’t harbour much contempt for this section of our society until I was directly confronted with the extent to which middle class socialisation is detrimental to the waging of serious struggles aimed at bettering the lives of our people. Seeing so many black students being apathetic to the plight of those coming from a working-class background made me understand how when a black child is raised in an environment where they are not taught the importance of struggle they become detached from the existing realities of natives, realities I believe should occupy the minds of all black people in our country.
Having grown up in a township where the sense of community was great, I could not comprehend what inspired the complete desensitisation of the middle-class black population at the university.
I decided I would contribute to the politicisation of Rhodes University by establishing a society in the form of a book club that would focus solely on African literature. I spoke to a few students about launching this society and knew immediately it would fail. Most students, even those who expressed a little enthusiasm, were simply not sold on the idea of having a society that would be regarded as ‘racist’. This left me feeling extremely dejected and defeated. I wanted a radical political home. I wanted to be a student activist but, as I’ve said, I didn’t want to join the PYA.
I had a decision to make. I would either continue not being an activist or I could form a political organisation, which, looking at the state of the institution and its extreme liberalism, would be almost impossible. One other option remained: to join SASCO and contribute to its revival. I had attended its national elective conference as a guest in Mangaung the year before and knew deep down that despite its relationship with the ANC, SASCO was a very progressive organisation whose autonomy made allowance for it to have a contradictory relationship with the ruling party. I rationalised this in my head for a very long time until finally, in September, I submitted my membership application form to the organisation.
Joining the South African Students Congress was, I felt, a very brave decision on my part. For many years, I’d been violently opposed to participating in politics of the Congress Movement, and had been hell-bent on seeking an alternative. But I finally succumbed to the pressure of the reality of the situation: that there was no student movement in the country with the power and potential of SASCO, even in a liberal and apathetic institution such as Rhodes University. We had a greater chance at winning victories for the working-class student with SASCO than we did with any other organisation, and to deny this truth would be to swim in an ocean of naivety.
In very many ways, SASCO represented everything I detested about you. The organisation had traits typical of the Mass Democratic Movement that we had come to know in the democratic dispensation. The politics of slates, factions and powermongering were rife, even at branch level. Two months after I joined SASCO, I was elected as the branch secretary following a controversial Annual General Meeting. The AGM was the third to sit after two others before it had been collapsed by the then sitting branch leadership, who didn’t want to cede power.
My election into the Branch Executive Committee of SASCO had it advantages. I was finally able to understand how the basic unit of an organisation operates. It gave me useful experience.
But in December 2012, I tended my resignation to SASCO following the outcome of your national elective congress held in Mangaung. I had known for some time that being a member of SASCO meant that I would have to campaign for you in the elections. But it was only after the Mangaung congress that I realised the deeper meaning of this matter: I was going to have to campaign young people in our country and tell them about the vision and mission of an organisation that I could not find it in myself to truly believe in. I was going to go against what I believed in, in the name of organisational discipline. I was going to tell my peers that there was hope yet for our country, and that this hope lay in the hands of an ANC under a leadership I didn’t believe was even capable of running a spaza shop in some secluded rural area. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t make myself do it. I was incapable of such deceit.